Kennedy: Patience, persistence in weapons hunt

(CNN) --With Saddam Hussein's regime out of the way, the U.S.-led coalition is pressing further in its hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, a CNN military analyst, on Thursday discussed how the inspection process will proceed.

KENNEDY: The Iraqi regime knows how to live in a country with inspectors searching for weapons of mass destruction. But there are large parts of the country that have not yet been crossed by any sort of U.S. and coalition forces.

If absolutely nothing was found after months of thorough searching, my question would be -- where was it shipped? If such weapons are not in the country, they must have been shipped out because we absolutely know they were there.

If the Iraqis are moving the weapons, the coalition will find them. If they have the weapons already hidden, the problem will be tougher. But if the coalition is thorough, patient and persistent, they will win this part of the fight.

The coalition officials should keep doing what they are doing. They are working off a prioritized list that consists of information from the U.N. inspectors' past inspections as well as current intelligence reports. The reporting is enabled by technology that helps them mine for the most specific information available.

There is going to be a major increase, by three or four times, in the current force looking weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That change will help the hunt.

There have been reports every day of finding new people who are close to the top of these various networks, and so I think, as we close in on those foreign fighters from Sudan, Libya and Egypt, we will find more and more evidence.

The network of weapons of mass destruction is one in which Iraq has done some buying but probably not selling. They are still in the business of trying to create their own weapons, particularly on the nuclear side but the chemical and biological as well. The situation has to be figured out.

Lt. Gen. Claudia J. Kennedy, former U.S. Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, is the first and only woman to have received this flag rank in the U.S. Army. She is one of CNN's military analysts.

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